You are of course not wrong with that. But also I tend to believe that high ranking military personnel are pretty practical and rational on their decision making. Getting US military boots on the ground in China would be bigger than Vietnam war scale of operations even to the US army and it would have immense effects on both US army and the country as a whole. The operation would practically mean moving a smaller European country quite literally across the ocean even without any warfare and when the receiving coast is armed to teeth and willing to fight for their land it's way more difficult.

And for what? Absolutely destroying on whatever respect and trust is left globally? Because there's no way in hell US army would conquer and keep the whole China. Maybe expand Hong Kong or Taiwan a bit and gain a relatively small area of land for material imports? It just doesn't make any kind of sense at all.

9/11 retaliaton at least made some sense as US was willing to punish someone for the tradegy and Iraq wars had resources they could actually hold and gain from but with China there's just no way for US to make any profitable scenario out of open warfare. Anything they might gain from that would be diminishingly small compared to the military effort and expenses they would need to get anything out of that fight.

And that's what I'm pretty much counting on. No matter how patriotic the generals might be, attacking China just doesn't make any sense and it doesn't have any arguments for it beyond the rambling of a demented leader they have. I refuse to believe that the biggest military and logistics might in the world would do that stupid things just because one man said so.